Hey ion readers! We're super excited about our friends over at Uberflip and all the great things they are doing with content marketing. We asked them to share their thoughts on the content experience. We hope you enjoy their perspective! And, if you are both an Uberflip customer and an ion interactive customer, let us know so we can talk about all the great ways you can use interactive content to enhance your Uberflip content.

How many visitors, shares, and potential leads do you think you’ve lost over the years? You know — the qualified traffic that landed in your blog or resource center, but didn’t stick around, let alone engage or convert?

Plenty of B2B marketers are creating tons of great content; however, they’re neglecting the content experience, or the contextual environment in which their content lives. If your awesome content is living in a sub-par experience — one that doesn’t promote content discovery or readability — your content simply isn’t going perform optimally.

Think of it this way: You have two pina coladas. You drink one in a wet basement. You drink the other on a warm, sandy beach. In which experience would you feel more comfortable ordering another?

The same concept can be applied to your content experience. Here are nine ways you can optimize your content experience to improve your content marketing performance.

1. Accommodate the entire buyer journey.

Your content readers and visitors are all on different journeys, seeking different content to provide answers to their questions as they move along.

Ensure you provide valuable content for every step of the buyer journey, from awareness, to consideration, to making a purchase decision, to becoming a customer. This could include providing new types of interactive content for lead generation, or case studies for purchase consideration.

2. Use less text.

Odds are, your target audience is busy — they don’t have time or energy to make sense of a massive wall of text.

3. Don’t forget about mobile!

Not utilizing responsive design can cause a massive leak in your content experience — make it a priority for your content to be readable, shareable, enjoyable, and effective regardless of device.

4. Ensure your premium content lives inside your blog.

Let’s say you have an eBook that you’d like to use to generate leads. Take a minute to review the steps that one must go through to obtain the eBook after they click the initial call-to-action. They must:

Go to your landing page

Fill out the landing page form

Go to their inbox to access the link to the eBook

Go to a static PDF file to read the eBook file

This process forces someone to go to three (three!) different locations that are not your blog or resource center to read your content — it’s no wonder potential leads might be falling through the cracks.

The solution? Have your premium content live on your blog or resource center, and gate it with a popup or overlay CTA.

Don’t get me wrong — there’s a time and a place for landing pages. But if you want to attract potential leads to your blog and have them convert there, it only makes sense to centralize your content within one content experience.

5. Encourage further content consumption.

The more content your visitors consume, the more exposure they get to your brand, and the more attachment they feel toward it.

Encourage your visitors to read more of your content by:

Providing content recommendations

Strategically placing relevant and contextual CTAs (e.g. that direct them to premium content or case studies)

Using plenty of internal links within your blog posts

Make a conscious effort to entice your readers to keep reading!

6. Organize your content in a way that’s meaningful to your target audience.

If you’re letting your content pile up by date and providing no other way for your visitors to find what they’re looking for, you’re pretty much doing this with the content you’ve poured your resources into creating:

7. Provide a search bar.

This might seem obvious, but don’t underestimate the power of the search bar!

Sometimes, visitors know exactly what they’re looking for. Don’t expect them to have a grand ol’ time sorting through your resources to find it — even if you have the best content in the world, it will frustrate more than delight them to have to go to great lengths to find what they need. There’s a good chance they’ll bounce and seek an answer elsewhere.

Plug that leak by implementing a search bar.

8. Use relevant and contextual CTAs.

Your CTAs won’t work if they’re not tailored to suit the situation. Take the nonsense CTA below as an extreme example.

You’ll have a better chance of hearing a virtual “yes” if your CTAs speak to who your readers are, where they are, and what they’re doing. Remember — a compelling CTA is as much a part of the content experience as the content itself.

9. Implement social sharing buttons.

Conversations and communities are created around content. Enable easy social sharing so you build your audience and establish your brand as a thought leader.

Optimize your content experience by:

Making social sharing obvious and easy (e.g. through social sharing buttons and click-to-tweets)

Include share counts to emphasize social proof

Enabling comments to elicit feedback and encourage discussion

If the option to share and engage isn’t there, your audience likely isn’t going to go out of their way to find it.